Saturday, May 30, 2015

Currently I am in Waterloo to participate in a brand new blood bowl tournament called Brewhouse Bowl - check out the NAF forum thread if you are interested. The basic premise is they cannot afford the fees to bring the teams to play - so they offer free booze instead.

Thus - after the first three matches players from the teams participate in an old GW mini game called Brewhouse Bash - the rules for which can be found here. The winner of the bash game will get a small boost to their blood bowl team going forwards.

The TO (grant85) is a top notch guy, very supportive of everyone else's tournaments, engaged and involved in; recruitment, setup/clean up, etc. I had suggested to him to build a custom Brewhouse Bash board - he just didn't have the cycles to devote to it. So wanting to do something cool for him I decided to have a go - I wanted this to be a surprise hence this is a scheduled post for that weekend.

So first up I did this design diagram so I knew what I had to build, based on the board section graphics in the PDF.

design diagram

I got some MDF from the home depot and got them to cut it to a size that would fit in a standard picture frame I bought at walmart. The MDF will give it a bit more strength because the rest is just built from cardboard, popsicle sticks and some odds and ends. You can see here how I did the grid and used hot glue to stick the stones and walls down.

draw grid

mark spaces for features

glue down squares for stones

two rows of double thickness card for walls

Once that was done - I sprayed it with grey primer, lined the gaps with black by hand and then gave it a couple coats using a textured spray paint from Krylon. This gave it a great stone texture and was infinitely easier than using sand or flock. Then I glued in inside the picture frame.

sprayed grey + lined black between stones

sprayed with Krylon Make-it-Stone textured spray paint

paint gaps black and glued into picture frame

In between while stuff was drying I was building all the features that weren't stone tiles or the walls. Some loose boxes I just cut squares of double thick card and glued cereal packet to the outside. The fermenter used floral water tube caps and some straws along with some water effects. All the wooden stuff was build with popsicle sticks, I tried to give it some height without being fully 3D. Finally I did the bbq after finding a good video about painting hot coals, I used a couple 40k biker bases glued together to make the metal "tub" part and followed the tutorial for painting.

glued thin card to squares cut from double thickness cardboard

made this fermentor from the caps off floral water tubes

larger features like the tables, etc. got square outlines

how the toilets were put together.

here the table is stained with a couple coats of seraphim sepia

toilets stained

the bar

booze crates - I used a different stain colour

the completed stairs/balcony

made the bbq with a couple 40k biker bases

As it was finished I would glue the pieces in - once everything was done and had a day to fully dry I gave it a nice heavy coat of gloss varnish and then a quick light shot of dullcote (that stuff is expensive!) I wasn't planning to but the gloss was very high.

all done!

I'm gonna give myself 40 painting points for this, it was a quite involved "terrain" style project - very happy with how it came out and I hope to apply some ideas I got to more terrain. Hope you like it Grant!

Monday, May 11, 2015

One of several projects I have ongoing at this time is getting these Raptor Legion scouts painted up. Our house is quite dry and I am starting to find paints dried out - I didn't want this to happen with the last of my gryphonne sepia so I decided to get these guys painted sooner rather than later.

One difference from the rest of my Raptor Legion marines is these guys have some cloth - to keep a limited palette I decided to use dheneb stone for the cloth similarly to the weapons. They are also covered in holsters and pouches - this is where I need your help. Should I do those dheneb stone as well or add another colour to the mix - a leather type is my thought. Opinions?

WIP-REVIEW: More scenery for Robotech!
-
First update of this year!
I've been building the scenery sets from 4Ground I have so far:
Primera actualización del año!
He estado armando los sets de escen...